1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to mobile software application development and testing and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for mobile application development and testing that avoids repackaging and reinstallation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile application development is performed in an integrated development environment (IDE) where application developers can write and compile mobile software applications. Ideally, mobile applications should be tested on the mobile devices on which they will ultimately run. This testing environment in the mobile device is called a sandbox. However, mobile platforms such as iPhone or Android do not allow third party IDEs to deploy applications to their private sandbox. In order to test and debug applications on mobile OSes like Android and iOS, the third party application developers must repackage the updated software and reinstall it on the mobile device using iTunes or Xcode. Therefore, while developing applications, it is not possible to see the effect of incremental debugging changes unless the developer repackages the entire application including the incremental change(s) into the desired deployment format and then re-installs the repackaged application on the mobile device. For a developer to test a single one-line change to source code, this imposes a significant overhead on the author in terms of packaging time. It also hinders the authoring experience by preventing IDEs from offering the author seamless transitions between authoring and debugging tasks.
Therefore, there is a need for a method for mobile application development and testing that avoids repackaging and reinstallation.